This is a "map" visualization, meaning that the images are plotted in a coordinate space — here, a 2D t-SNE embedding of a 24-dimensional HSV histogram space. The images are randomly sampled from nearly 90 years of TIME magazine pages. The amount sampled is roughly the number of pages in TIME magazine for an entire year (which surprisingly has not changed much over time). Images are allowed to plot adjacent to their true locations, but no further. Over 95% of all sampled images were plotted. The map is also partially annotated with histogram lines. Blue markers point to the annotated images.